Testaments of Heart

Chapter Two

The truck driving away from the small village houses four people in its darkened back. In the corner, a girl with rich, brown skin lay cowering and crying, hiding behind the darkness of her cornrows falling from her head. In the other corner a boy, probably around the age of 12, stares into the canvas wall across from him, and another girl with ruby brown hair looks at the girl crying in the corner with annoyance and anger. But close to the door, a girl of bleach-blonde hair lays her head against the rocking walls with her eyelids covering her eyes. Not a mark of fear coats her features, but tiredness etches into her expression.

A dress of light blue, made of itchy and old fabric, comes to her knees, forcing her calves to meet the cold, metal floor. The floor is also hard on her backside, but she has gone through worse seating situations. The wall crashes against her head on the uneven roads, that crunch against the moving wheels, and her hands fidget with the fabric of her dress. Her head pounds with a little trickle of dried blood barely visible on the roots of her hair and a swelling bruise on her cheek. She takes a deep breath, constricting her ribs even tighter against her shallow stomach, and releases with a big sigh.

Her name is Aislynn, but the girl's name is pointless because her life is, and always has been, worth nothing.

She opens her eyes and studies the truck she was placed in after she was paraded around her village behind those soldiers. After half an hour of pulling and tugging her with their horses, they brought her and the girl crying in the corner to this truck and quite literally threw them in. It's plain and metal, besides the dark canvas to encage them within. The only light comes from a small slit where the metal and canvas meet, allowing Aislynn to see the other three in the truck.

Aislynn doesn't feel any fear, like when the soldier had asked her what her name was. Anxiety had long left her veins and anger is chained deep inside of her heart. Aislynn is simply bored. Bored with nothing to do in this metal, moving machine. She's so use to always working in the fields dawn until dusk, then going home to be so tired she could barely eat. That's what her life had become these past few years: working and sleeping. She had found comfort in the schedule and the ordinary life, but now that had all been taken from her. Aislynn sighs again, annoyed by the thoughts of her life.

Not anymore though, thinks Aislynn. Your life is no longer yours. Aislynn silently laughs at the situation, and puts her back against the wall, drowning in her thoughts. She lets the memories of her years fill her mind, her only company in the boredom of the truck. To Aislynn's surprise, one memory from about two years prior conquers her thoughts...

* * *

It had been an average day in the soybean field, but every worker looks forward to a meal at their own home, which many in the fields would probably not be able to receive. The sun is close to reaching the horizon, and since the nights become colder, because winter would arrive in two months, people began placing extra shirts over their heads. They each hold a basket filled with soybeans and wait anxiously for the sound of the bell, sounding the end of the day. Including tired and overworked Aislynn.

Her hair is tied back and up with a piece of the twine from the roll her mother had bought years ago. Greying and unwashed for a few weeks, her pants hang loose, even though they're meant to fit tight. She wears a faded, pink shirt that she threw over herself a few minutes earlier, keeping heat in against her skin, and shoes torn and practically useless if it would begin to rain. She wears no gloves, giving the two pairs her family could afford to Raveena and Zenith, and receives rough and blistered hands in return.

She looks to the west towards the sun and hopes to see its beams coating the horizon with fairy-dust pink and flaming orange. She sighs her disappointment when she sees the sun is a good half an hour away from making its contact with the world, so she turns her gaze to the north where a bed awaits her with her sister, who is somewhere in the same field. Her mother and father work somewhere in the sweet potato fields and Zenith in processing factories that would work until nightfall. She would be in the village soon, and that's the thought that gets her through another 30 minutes before the bell, mercifully, chimes loudly.